Encyclopedia of American Loons

Sunday, March 18, 2018

More state senators. James Rand McNally is
a member of the Tennessee Senate (not exactly a hotbed of reason and rationality),
representing the 5th District, and the 50th and current Lieutenant
Governor of Tennessee since January 2017. McNally is a member of the Religious
Right, and is a firm opponent of the separation of Church and State. For instance,
in 2013 McNally introduced bill SB 965,
which would make it virtually impossible for citizens to protest violations of
the separation. Indeed, the bill would make such complaints in practice illegal,
since it would be illegal to engage in writing “with a local government unit or local public servant in a repetitious
manner” with the intent to persuade them to change policies like prayer
before meetings if such letters include “a
threat of initiating legal action against the local government or local public
servant challenging the particular policy, practice, action or custom.” Yet
it would, of course, also be impossible to file any complaint without engaging
precisely in such exchanges. And just to be clear: McNally aimed to impose such limitations on federal courts. Of course, the bill would rather explicitly contradict the part of the First
Amendment prohibiting denying people the right of people to petition the
Government for a redress of grievances. McNally, of course, is firmly opposed
that Constitution, though like most religious fundamentalists who hate the fact
that the Constitution prevents instituting theocracy, would vehemently deny that he is opposed to it.

McNally is also vehemently opposed to what he perceives to be “a movement to target people of faith who
are being nominated,” which exists only in his head but which he thinks
characterizes the Democratic party. The Democrats “want their own, either agnostics or people who are non-Christians.”
Politics is really a war between Jesus and the Left/Satan.

Diagnosis: Perhaps “theocrat” would be an
exaggeration, but McNally is certainly an ardent opponent of the separation of
church and state. He’s also a powerful guy. Be wary.

Friday, March 16, 2018

Grady McMurtry is a regular guest on
Revelation TV, especially on The Q&A Show (with Revelation TV founder and
host Howard Conder). Now, Revelation TV is a British endeavor, but McMurtry is
American: he is the head of Creation Worldview Ministries in Orlando, which
consists of one person in addition to himself. So, yeah – he is a minor player.
But he has received some attention by being unusually ridiculous, even by the already
dismal creationist standards.

Part of the problem is, of course, that
McMurtry has no idea about what science
is. Thus, McMurtry says things like “evolutionists
do not have one single scientific proof that [the earth] is old,” being
apparently oblivious that “proof” is an expression belonging to mathematics and
formal logic, not science; scientists have of course ample evidence that the Earth is old. Apparently state politicians, who
are not usually elected for their scientific literacy, are sometimes impressed with McMurtry’s work.

As with most “scientific creationists” his
own method for supporting the inerrancy of the Bible is the exact opposite of a
scientific method. Instead, McMurtry carefully follows the form of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy (centered on the inerrancy of the Bible), and selects evidence to support the
dogma by the time-honored means of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning.

Of course, McMurtry doesn’t only reject the
science of biology; geology has to go, too (there is a video of him trying to
argue against plate tectonics, for those who are interested). It is probably
little surprise that he is a climate change denialist,
too, viewing climate change as a communist conspiracy and environmentalism in
general as a type of “terrorism”: “I Dr. Grady S. McMurtry have been studying
the Global Warming/Global Cooling controversy since the 1960s. […] I am completely
convinced that the controversy is 100% politically motivated and not based on
good science. The promoters of either view are either extreme socialists or
extreme communists. Their sole primary purpose in promoting either view is to
destroy Christian capitalism and replace it with extreme socialism/communism
based upon the religion of Secular Humanism.” Of course, nothing in that
statement, or anything else he has done, involves any discussion of anything
resembling the science of the topic,
any more than his discussions of biology do. There has, of course, never been any scientific global warming/global cooling controversy.

Diagnosis: Religious fanatic, who uses his
religious fanaticism to fuel his astonishingly silly pseudoscience and science
denial. Not an uncommon situation, and McMurtry is honestly a B-level celebrity
as far as creationist celebrities are measured. But whatever his impact may be,
it is certainly not for the benefit of mankind.

McMullen thinks that most of the enormous
body of scientific research supporting evolution is “fraud”, primarily because he rejects evolution on decidedly
non-scientific grounds. He also thinks evolution is a matter of belief and that the “religion of humanism”
is pushing for evolution without scientific grounding – McMullen being
apparently unable to distinguish scientific research from creationist petitions
if his life depended on it.

Diagnosis: Not a scientist by any stretch
of the imagination, but a religious extremist who apparently doesn’t mind much
that his audiences fail to recognize that he isn’t. Pseudoscientist, though –
we may be willing to grant him that title.